All's well for Spacey

ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT - faces in entertainment

He's no American beauty to London critics, but the actor presses ahead at the Old Vic Theatre.

June 10, 2006|By Sarah Lyall, The New York Times

LONDON - Between the relentless public attention and the sometimes scathing reviews, Kevin Spacey has had a rough year and a half as artistic director at the Old Vic Theatre. But nothing was so disastrous as the debacle surrounding Resurrection Blues, a star-laden production that drew horrendous reviews and closed a week early this spring, just in time for the announcement that the theater would go dark until September.

The news had London's ravening theater critics sputtering into their wine, questioning Spacey's judgment and even, in the case of Nicholas de Jongh of The Evening Standard, calling for him to resign. But through it all Spacey has been his usual, focused self, asserting his right to learn from his mistakes while announcing an ambitious program for next year that includes plays by Shakespeare and Eugene O'Neill.

"In no way, shape or form am I in any way less than delighted, less than thrilled, to go to work on behalf of the Old Vic Theatre," he said in a telephone interview recently, in which he seemed variously philosophical, ebullient, confident and, in his sharp and controlled way, very slightly defensive about the news media.

He added: "I'm not going to make general comments about the British press. This is not a fight. It's not us against them. To some degree they're taking advantage of the fact that I'm a well-known actor and using it as a headline in their stories to sell papers. This is what they do."

It was inevitable that Spacey, 46, a bona fide Hollywood film star in the un-Hollywood world of the London theater, would become a magnet for attention when he took on the Old Vic job. Once the home of the National Theatre under Laurence Olivier, the theater was on the verge of closing for good, possibly for conversion into a lap-dancing club, when Spacey arrived, along with the promise of glamorous productions and big-name casts.

Since then, even when things have gone well, Spacey has found himself under attack. The first play he put on, the Dutch comedy Cloaca, drew terrible reviews -- The Daily Telegraph and The Times of London pronounced it a "stinker" -- and anemic ticket sales. Other productions, such as The Philadelphia Story, were more successful but tended to fare much better with audiences than with critics. Arguing that he wanted to focus on crowd-pleasing productions that would draw people in, Spacey was then criticized for not sticking to a more classical repertory.

He was also called too bigheaded when he took off several weeks from The Philadelphia Story to film Superman Returns. (He plays Lex Luthor in the movie, due in theaters June 28.) Unflattering stories were spread with glee around town. In 2004, the newspapers made much of a curious incident in which Spacey said he had been mugged in a park in the London borough of Lambeth at 4:30 a.m. while walking his dog. (He later amended the account, saying that in fact he had lent his cell phone to a young man who took it and ran away, causing Spacey to trip over his dog's leash and hit his head.)

Plans for the next season include O'Neill's Moon for the Misbegotten, in which Spacey is to star; Twelfth Night and The Taming of the Shrew, which are to be performed by the all-male Propeller group directed by Edward Hall; and a revival of John Osborne's Entertainer, which is to star Robert Lindsay. Future performances are to include a revival of Alan Ayckbourn's Norman Conquests, directed by Matthew Warchus, and, at Christmas 2007, a pantomime version of Cinderella, to be written by Stephen Fry.

The critics seem mollified, at least in part.

"I feel a certain sympathy for Spacey in that he is trying to square an impossible circle: to create commercially viable product in a theater founded on missionary zeal," Michael Billington wrote in The Guardian. "But, while one can't complain at a season containing O'Neill, Shakespeare and Osborne, one wishes there were a greater sense of creative ferment."

Spacey says that the plan all along had been to hold a truncated season, running from September through June.

"It's very easy for someone to say, `The theater's dark for five months,' " he said. "But it was already going to be dark for three."

He declared himself to be unperturbed.

"There must be an impression that somehow this stuff bothers me, but they're selling newspapers, and I'm selling theater seats," he says of the news media.

"I'm having the time of my life," he says. "I love the people who work at this place, and the irony is that instead of all this attention having an undermining or a negative effect, it's galvanizing us."

Spacey reiterated his plan to stay in the job for the next 10 years, doing the occasional film.

"The fact of the matter is that we are getting an enormous amount of attention," he says. "Whether that's positive or not, people are talking about the Old Vic Theatre again with passion and commitment and controversy and debate."